Ever since the dawn of the PlayStation Vita homebrew scene, a popular question has been whether the PlayStation Vita can emulate the PlayStation 2 due to its wealth of memorable titles and the answer has always been a flat no as the PSVita doesn’t have nearly enough power to emulate this beloved 6th generation console with playable performance. However, Xerpi has gone ahead to do the unthinkable and managed to port a PlayStation 2 emulator called ‘Play!‘ to the console while also publishing a video of the emulator in action.
For those who are unaware of Xerpi’s feats, he’s the developer behind udcd_uvc, a kernel plugin that allows you to stream your PSVita’s screen to a PC in real-time thus giving it Switch-like abilities as you can play games in both handheld and TV mode. Furthermore, he’s also been working on porting Linux to the console on-and-off so perhaps one day, we’ll see some lightweight distribution running on the console although things are still in early stages.


Before getting your hopes up high, it’s important to state that Xerpi’s Play! port is a proof of concept meaning that it was created to prove the emulator could run on the console. In a demonstration video posted on YouTube (below), the emulator is shown running the Teapot demo from PS2SDK not a commercial game and since it’s a proof of concept, we can conclude that if any games manage to run at all, they will probably be a slow slideshow at best.
It’s important to state the Play! emulator which is much more capable than the PSVita so even if Xerpi does indeed work his magic, commercial PlayStation 2 games will never be playable on the Vita although you could probably mess around with simpler PS2 homebrew if that’s your thing.

As of right now, there’s no VPK for a compiled build of Play! for the PSVita but you can run it on your console by compiling it as per instructions on GitLab. For those still thinking this is an April Fool’s joke, Xerpi personally confirmed its veracity but he made it clear that it’s just a proof of concept more than anything else!

http://wololo.net/2020/04/01/psvita-...ut-a-real-poc/